A TURNING-POINT FOR IRAQ, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

 

 Artículo de  “The Economist” del 28/01/2005

 

Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)

 

 The ballots cast by Iraqis on Sunday may mark the start of a long and arduous journey towards stability and freedom for Iraqis. Or the beginning of a descent into anarchy, civil war and the break-up of the country

 

IRAQIS danced in the streets outside the polling station, proudly displaying the indelible blue ink on their fingers that showed they had cast their votes—one gleefully called it the “mark of freedom”. However, this scene, on Friday January 28th, took place among the relatively small community of Iraqi exiles in Sydney, Australia. Voting in Iraq itself, to be held on Sunday, seems unlikely to produce such joyful scenes. If they turn out at all, voters are likely to be terrified of being attacked, at the polling station or afterwards, by insurgents who have declared “holy war” on the elections, anyone who takes part in them—and indeed on the very concept of democracy.

 

The fear of assassination has meant that, by and large, only the most senior party leaders have done any visible campaigning. The names of most of the 7,000 candidates for the 275-seat Iraqi national assembly have been kept secret until the last minute, for fear of making them an assassination target.

On Thursday, an insurgent group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian affiliated to al-Qaeda, released a videotape of the killing of a candidate from the party of Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister. America has boosted its troop levels from 138,000 to 150,000 to provide additional security for the elections, in which a total of around 300,000 Iraqi and foreign troops will be on guard. Iraq’s international border crossings were shut on Friday. Travel between its provinces was temporarily banned and a 7pm to 6am curfew has been imposed in most cities.

In recent days the rate of car-bombings and other attacks has fallen, though it is feared that the rebels are simply conserving resources to mount spectacular attacks over the weekend. In four of Iraq’s 18 provinces where the Sunni Arab insurgency is strongest, including parts of Baghdad, there may be mayhem on Sunday, or at the very least, a derisorily low turnout. In at least another four provinces (see map below), fear of bombs and bullets is rife.

 

The stain of democracy

Iraq’s Shia Muslims, around 60% of the 25m-27m population, will be torn between the fatwa issued by the country’s most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, instructing the faithful to cast their votes, and the fear of being blown up at the ballot box or murdered afterwards. The marking of voters’ fingers with indelible ink, to prevent multiple voting, will also make them an identifiable target long after polling day.

However, most Shias and most Kurds (around 20% of the population, based largely in northern Iraq) seem keen to vote, despite the risks. So even if most Sunni Arabs (the remaining 20% of Iraqis, roughly speaking) stay away out of fear or opposition to the elections, it is possible that up to two-thirds of Iraq’s electorate will turn out in what will be a genuine multi-party election—a dazzling rarity in the Arab world—for the first time in half a century.

No fewer than 84 parties and 27 candidates running on their own are stuffed into a national list from which voters will choose. In truth, no one knows who will prevail. The likeliest outcome is that the United Iraqi Alliance (better known by Iraqis as “the Shia house”, “the clerics' list” or simply “169”, after its number on the vast ballot paper) will do best, since it has Mr Sistani’s tacit blessing, though without winning an outright majority. A catch-all Kurdish Alliance is sure to sweep up the vast majority of Kurdish votes. And a list headed by Mr Allawi, a secular Shia who has also reached out to members of the former ruling Baath Party and assorted Sunnis, may do better than was once expected, thanks to an image of toughness and steadiness burnished by him during his past six months in office.

 

No turbans allowed

Mr Allawi's group is more secular and less sectarian than the Shia house, though the latter’s leaders insist they are not seeking an Iranian-style theocracy: “We will have no turbans in the government,” says one. The likely outcome of the election is a coalition involving the Shia house, the Kurds, Mr Allawi’s lot and several Sunni Arab-led parties.

Seats will be allocated by pure proportional representation. The new assembly must first vote for a president and two vice-presidents who, in turn, as a presidential council, must unanimously choose a prime minister. He must then choose a government, which must be endorsed by a simple majority of the assembly’s members. Perhaps more important, the assembly must oversee the writing of a new and final constitution, to be drafted by mid-August and endorsed in a referendum by mid-October, leading to a full general election under new rules by mid-December (though the rules allow for some slippage). If two-thirds of voters in three provinces reject the new constitution, the process must start again. That gives both the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs a veto.

All this, however, seems immaterial while the insurgency rages, at a rate much higher than a year ago. American officers say their troops are subjected to some 70 attacks a day. Since the American invasion, around 1,100 have died in combat and another 250 or so in accidents. Even more grimly, the tally of Iraqi civilian deaths continues to rise inexorably. IraqBodyCount, an anti-war but fastidious group, reckons that 15,000-18,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American invasion in March 2003. By a Brookings Institution estimate based mainly on Pentagon briefings, some 32,000 insurgents have been killed or captured since the conventional phase of the war ended in April 2003. Yet the number of active insurgents, though hard to count, is plainly swelling. The head of Iraq's intelligence service suggested earlier this month that there were 40,000 hard-core rebels, with another 160,000-odd Iraqis helping them out. That is several times the standard, albeit rough, estimate of a year ago.

More than two-thirds of American deaths have occurred in just two provinces: Anbar (including Fallujah and Ramadi) and Baghdad. But Iraq’s four biggest cities—Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk—all echo daily to gunfire and explosions. Since the Americans recaptured the insurgents’ hotbed of Fallujah in November, their enemy has switched his focus to the northern city of Mosul, a religiously and ethnically explosive city now starkly divided on either side of the Tigris river. Though it is the biggest city of the supposedly quiescent Shias, Basra is highly dangerous too.

Moreover, the current relative calm among the Shia Arabs could be illusory. The notion that all but four provinces are safe is false. Armed gangs and a vast criminal underworld hold sway in many parts of the country. A rebellious young clerical firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr, and his thuggish militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have been lying low since Mr Sistani talked them out of their rebellion against American occupation late last summer. But they control swathes of the centre and south, and the Americans have consistently underestimated the Sadrists’ power and reach. Though Mr Sadr himself is staying out of the election fray, he might well urge his men to rise up again if he or his group were cut out of a power-sharing deal.

The safest part of Iraq is Kurdistan, which has ruled itself since Saddam Hussein lost his first Gulf war against the Americans in 1991. But even here, tension is growing. The disputed city of Kirkuk and its oil-rich, ethnically mixed surroundings are a tinderbox. After bitter pre-election wrangling, it has been agreed that Kurds displaced by Mr Hussein in his brutal Arabisation campaign will be able to vote, so tipping the demography back towards them. Sunni Arabs are furious. With the insurgents doing their best to provoke sectarian warfare, this is but one of many potential flashpoints which might trigger wider unrest that leads inexorably towards civil war and even a break-up of Iraq.

It has not all been unremitting gloom and doom. A new currency has stayed steady and workers in the public sector, including teachers and doctors, have seen their wages rise as much as 40-fold. But virtually everything is being kiboshed by the insurgency. Unemployment is stuck, officially, at 30-40%, though some economists reckon that more than half of Iraqis are jobless. Basic utilities are still wretched. Last week, nearly half of Baghdadis had no running water. Motorists are again queuing, sometimes for 12 hours, to fill up with petrol. Above all, oil production and exports are still far below hoped-for levels, mainly due to sabotage, knocking 15% off expected revenues. In December, some 2.2m barrels a day were being pumped, against a projected 3m b/d, the pre-war figure.

 

Yankee go home...but not yet

Mr Allawi argues that, provided the Americans do not cut and run, the insurgency can be contained, if not beaten. The main plan is to beef up the home-grown Iraqi forces (now totalling 127,000 against an eventual goal of 273,000), enabling the Americans and their allies to wind down steadily their troop numbers. This, within the next few years, is a false hope. The Iraqi forces are utterly feeble. At present, only some 5,000 of them are a match for the insurgents; perhaps as many as 12,000 are fairly self-sufficient. Most of the rest are unmotivated, unreliable, ill-trained, ill-equipped, prone to desertion, even ready to switch sides. If the Americans left today, they would be thrashed.

Besides giving more moderate Sunni Arabs fair representation on the new presidential council and on the committee drafting the new constitution, the new government must also reach out to spokesmen for the insurgency, which is far from monolithic. Indeed, no one is sure how to configure it. A year or so ago, the CIA reckoned that 40-60 groups were acting more or less independently of each other, though they now seem to be co-ordinating their attacks more than before. The new government must try to pick away those who might talk from those who are bent on eternal war against western civilisation.

Most insurgents are above all nationalists. The government might accommodate many of them if they could be convinced that the Americans were certain to leave—if not immediately, at least soon. A new government could ask foreign troops to leave; but that is barely conceivable in the short run, because any government is bound, for now, to rely heavily on American force for its mere physical survival.

A rough timetable could be spelled out: some voices in the Sunni rejectionist camp have aired the possibility of a ceasefire if the Americans promised, in principle, to leave in, say, six months. That is unthinkable for the moment but may offer a chink of light for negotiations. President George Bush told Friday’s New York Times that he would withdraw American troops if asked but that those political leaders likely to win Sunday’s election understood the need to keep them for now.

For the past year, chaos has increased, along with ordinary Iraqis' hatred of the American occupation. But they also hate “the beheaders”—the likes of Mr Zarqawi. The emergence of a new government with a popular mandate will not change the situation overnight. It may be too late for any government seen to be sponsored by the Americans to establish itself. Nothing is certain—except that much more blood will be shed, and even more if Iraq's Sunni Arabs continue to feel disenfranchised.